CEDR Policy Brief WP 2015-­‐10 Educator and Student Diversity in Washington
State: Gaps and Historical Trends
Dan Goldhaber
Roddy Theobald
Christopher Tien
T h e C e n t e r f o r E d u c a t i o n D a t a & R e s e a r c h U n i v e r s i t y o f W a s h i n g t o n B o t h e l l 3 8 7 6 B r i d g e W a y N . S t e . 2 0 1 S e a t t l e , W A 9 8 1 0 3 ( 2 0 6 ) 5 4 7 -­‐ 5 5 8 5 c e d r @ u . w a s h i n g t o n . e d u w w w . c e d r . u s © 2015 by Dan Goldhaber, Roddy Theobald, and Christopher Tien. All rights reserved. Short sections of text,
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Introduction and National Context
It has been well documented—including in recent reports from Washington State
(Professional Educator Standards Board, 2014) and several large districts across the country
(Albert Shanker Institute, 2015)—that the public teaching workforce is far less racially and
ethnically diverse than the student body in U.S. public schools. For instance, Figure 1 shows a
scatterplot of the percent of non-White, non-Hispanic (“minority”) students (on the x-axis) and
the corresponding percent of minority teachers (on the y-axis) in each state represented in the
2011–12 Schools and Staffing Survey. The dashed line represents the points where these
percentages are equal and illustrates that every state in the country has a lower (and, in most
cases, dramatically lower) percentage of minority teachers than percentage of minority students.
Figure 1. State-Level Percentages of Non-White Students and Non-White Teachers, 2011–12 School Year
Washington State, the focus of this report, is no exception.1 As shown in Figure 1,
Washington public schools have over three times as many minority students (39.3%) as nonWhite teachers (13.0%), which is potentially problematic given both theoretical arguments and
empirical evidence suggesting that minority students might benefit from a more diverse teaching
workforce (see companion report Goldhaber, Theobald, & Tien, 2015). That said, Figure 1 also
illustrates that Washington is near the median in terms of educator diversity among states with a
1
Increasing the diversity of the state’s teaching workforce is a priority of Washington’s Professional Educator
Standards Board. See https://script.google.com/a/macros/pesb.wa.gov/s/
AKfycbyHN1924OErepuM4FNUgv29wY5ZNF3KRYQyXzFGIwcbfHqCfoo/exec 1 similar percentage of minority students. Specifically, of the four states with the most similar
percentages of minority students (all labeled in Figure 1), Arkansas and Alaska have higher
percentages of minority teachers, while Connecticut and Colorado have lower percentages.
In this report, we first provide a “snapshot” of the current state of educator and student
diversity in Washington State public schools, focusing specifically on teacher/student diversity
gaps for three underrepresented minority (URM) groups: American Indian, Black, and Hispanic.
We then provide some historical context by investigating trends in educator and student diversity
in Washington State over the past 25 years and conclude with some broad takeaways.
Current Teacher/Student Diversity Gaps
Figure 2 summarizes the percentages of URM teachers and students in three types of
public schools: all public schools across the country (first set of bars), all public schools in
Washington State (second set of bars), and four individual school districts in Washington State
(last four sets of bars).2 The height of each bar represents the total percentage of URM students
or teachers, while the segments of each bar break this percentage into Black, Hispanic, and
American Indian. Finally, the bracket within each group represents the “raw” teacher/student
diversity gap, which we define as the difference between the percentage of URM students and
the percentage of URM teachers. Figure 2 illustrates that the raw gap in Washington State
(20.2%) is smaller than the national gap (26.0%).
Figure 2. Disaggregated Percentages of URM Teachers and Students in National, Washington State, and Select
District Public Schools, 2011–12 School Year
2
These data (and all data in this subsection) are from the 2011–12 school year, which is the most recent year in
which nationally representative teacher data are available (from the Schools and Staffing Survey).
2 However, there is no agreed-upon way to measure diversity gaps in public schools, and
different measures can give a different picture of how Washington compares to the national
figures. For example, when these gaps are represented as ratios, the gap in Washington State is
actually much larger than the national gap; specifically, while the percentage of URM students in
the country is roughly 2.5 times the percentage of URM teachers, the comparable ratio in
Washington State is close to 5. Focusing on the specific racial/ethnic groups in Washington
State, this disparity is clearly driven by Hispanic teachers and students, as the percentage of
Hispanic students (19.6%) is over six times greater than the percentage of Hispanic teachers in
the state.
There is considerable variability across the four districts highlighted in Figure 2, but
substantial teacher/student diversity gaps exist in each district. To put the magnitude of these
gaps in context, if Seattle Public Schools wanted to hire enough Black teachers so that the
percentage of Black teachers in the district equaled the percentage of Black students, they would
need to hire 387 new Black teachers (or 48.8% of all Black teachers in the state working outside
of Seattle). Likewise, if Yakima Public Schools wanted to hire enough Hispanic teachers to
eliminate the gap between the percentage of Hispanic students and teachers in the district, they
would need to hire 558 new Hispanic teachers (or 28.9% of all Hispanic teachers in the state
working outside of Yakima).
As shown in Figure 3, teacher/student diversity gaps exist in nearly every single district
in Washington State. Figure 3 plots the percentage of URM teachers against the percentage of
URM students in each district in the state, and (as in Figure 1) the dashed line represents the
points where these percentages are equal. With the exceptions of 3 districts above this line (all of
which have fewer than 400 students), Washington State school districts tend to follow the trend
of having a far less diverse teaching workforce than student body.
3 Figure 3. District-Level Percentages of URM Students and URM Teachers, 2011–12 School Year
In Figure 3, the vertical distance between each point and the dashed line is the raw
teacher/student diversity gap. We explore the district-level factors that predict the size of this gap
and find that larger districts and districts with a high percentage of American Indian students
tend to have a higher teacher/student diversity gap than districts that are similar in other ways.
Interestingly, the level of student poverty in the district appears not to be predictive of the
teacher/student diversity gap once we control for the racial/ethnic composition of the district.3
From a student’s perspective, of course, the percentage of URM teachers in the district
matters far less than the probability of being assigned to specific classroom teachers. For
instance, minority students in a district could conceivably be assigned disproportionately to
minority teachers within the district, thereby reducing the “student-level” diversity gap. To
explore this, Figure 4 relies on the student and teacher data from the Washington State Office of
Superintendent of Public Instruction from 2011–12 to calculate the probability that different
students are actually taught by different teachers. Figure 4A illustrates the probability that
students of different races will be taught by a teacher of different races in mathematics, while
Figure 4B gives the same probabilities for reading.
Figure 4 illustrates that there is some nonrandom sorting of students and teachers along
racial lines; that is, relative to students of other races, White students are more likely to be taught
both mathematics and reading by a White teacher, Hispanic students are more likely to be taught
mathematics and reading by a Hispanic teacher, Black students are more likely to be taught
mathematics and reading by a Black teacher, and American Indian students are more likely to be
3
These linear regression estimates are available from the authors upon request.
4 taught mathematics by an American Indian teacher. Of course, students of all races are more
likely to be taught by a White teacher than a teacher of a different race.
These patterns could be due to nonrandom sorting across schools (e.g., Black students are
more likely to attend schools with more Black teachers than other students) or within schools
(e.g., American Indian students are more likely to be assigned to an American Indian teacher
than other students in the same school). When we reproduce Figure 4 using school-level means
(i.e., the average percentage of teachers of different races in the schools attended by students of
different races), the results are very similar to those in Figure 4, suggesting that nonrandom
sorting across schools is largely responsible for the patterns in this figure.4
Figure 4A. Student-Teacher Race Matches in Mathematics Courses, 2011–12 School Year
4
If the patterns in Figure 4 were due to nonrandom sorting of students to teachers within schools, the average
percentage of Black teachers in the schools attended by Black students would be lower than the probability that a
Black student is actually assigned to a Black teacher. These figures are available from the authors upon request. 5 Figure 4B. Student-Teacher Race Matches in Reading Courses, 2011–12 School Year
6 Historical Trends in Educator and Student Diversity
The figures and discussion in the previous section emphasized the considerable mismatch
between the diversity of the student body and (lack of) diversity of the public teaching workforce
in Washington State. In this section, we explore these trends over the last 25 years (going back to
1988, the first year that student demographic data are available from the Public Elementary/
Secondary School Universe Survey, published by the National Center for Education Statistics
[NCES]).5 As a starting point, Figure 5 plots the percentage of URM students (green solid line)
and URM teachers (green dashed line) in Washington State public schools since 1988 (the green
shaded area represents the teacher/student diversity gap over time). Over the past 25 years, the
percentage of URM students has increased over 16 percentage points, while the percentage of
URM teachers has increased by less than 2 percentage points. Put another way, while the
percentage of URM teachers has increased by about 50% of its value in 1988, the percentage of
URM students has increased by more than 150% over the same time period.
Figure 5. Historical Trends in State-Level Percentages of URM Teachers and URM Students
Clearly, the modest increases in the diversity of the teaching workforce in Washington
State are not keeping up with the corresponding increases in the diversity of the state’s students.
To understand the sources of this expansion, Figure 6 breaks down the percentages in Figure 5
by racial/ethnic category. It is quickly apparent from Figure 6 that the gaps in Figure 5 are driven
by a rapid increase in the percentage of Hispanic students in the state. Because of this, when we
plot the teacher/student diversity gap by racial/ethnic category in Figure 7, it is the gap between
the percentages of Hispanic students and Hispanic teachers that has grown dramatically over the
past 25 years, while the gaps for Blacks and American Indians have remained relatively constant
(and even narrowed somewhat over the past 5 years).
5
See https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubschuniv.asp
7 Figure 6. Historical Trends in State-Level Disaggregated Percentages of URM Teachers and URM Students
Figure 7. Historical Trends in State-Level Teacher/Student Diversity Gaps
8 Figure 6 also illustrates the sources of the modest increases in the diversity of the
teaching workforce and shows that the percentage of Hispanic teachers in the state has increased
steadily over the past 25 years (although not nearly at the rate of the percentage of Hispanic
students). This increase is a direct function of two processes: teacher hiring (i.e., the number of
teachers who enter the workforce) and teacher attrition (i.e., the number of teachers who leave
the workforce). Figure 8 plots hiring and attrition rates by racial/ethnic group over the past 25
years; a solid fill illustrates periods in which the percentage of hired teachers in that group was
higher than the percentage of departing teachers in that group, while a dashed fill represents the
opposite. Interestingly, hiring rates of Hispanic teachers have outpaced attrition rates in every
year, which accounts for the steady increase in the percentage of Hispanic teachers in Figure 6.
On the other hand, hiring and attrition rates have largely cancelled each other out for Black and
American Indian teachers, which means that the percentages of the workforce from these groups
have not markedly changed over the past 25 years.
Figure 8. Historical Trends in State-Level Teacher Hiring and Attrition Rates by URM Category
Conclusions
Given both the rhetoric around the importance of teacher workforce diversity and the
empirical evidence suggesting that minority students might benefit from a more diverse teaching
workforce (Goldhaber et al., 2015), this report presents a “glass half-full”/“glass half-empty”
scenario for Washington State policy makers. On the “half-full” side, the state has made strides
(particularly in recent years) to increase the diversity of the state’s teaching workforce,
particularly among Hispanic teachers; but, on the “half-empty side,” these increases are not
nearly keeping pace with increases in the diversity of the state’s public school students (again,
particularly among Hispanic students). Moreover, the pace of the diversification of the public
school student body is unlikely to slow in coming years; for example, the NCES estimates that
the percentage of U.S. public school students who are Hispanic will increase from 24% to 29%
over the next 10 years (Snyder, 2014). Because of this, Washington State teacher education
9 programs will need to recruit and hire far more URM (and particularly Hispanic) teachers to
ensure that the diversity of the state’s teaching workforce begins to reflect the diversity of its
student body.
However, as we discuss in the companion paper (Goldhaber et al., 2015), teacher
workforce diversity is just one of many competing objectives for improving the education
system, and there may be substantial challenges and potential unintended consequences to
diversifying the teacher workforce. Moreover, we must know much more about why there is a
lack of diversity in the teacher workforce before we can design effective strategies to recruit
more minority teachers.6 Nonetheless, the figures in this report illustrate just how far Washington
State (and the country as a whole) has to go to ensure that the diversity of the teaching workforce
reflects the diversity of the students they teach.
6
This question is part of the larger focus of this project, funded by the Gates Foundation, titled “The teacher
pipeline in Washington State: Examining the transition from student teaching to the classroom and implications for
workforce diversity.”
10 References
Albert Shanker Institute. (2015). The state of teacher diversity in American education. Retrieved
from http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/teacherdiversity.
Goldhaber, D., Theobald, R., & Tien, C. (2015). The theoretical and empirical arguments for
diversifying the teacher workforce: A review of the evidence. Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation.
Snyder, T. D. (2014). Digest of education statistics, 2013 (NCES 2014-086). Washington, DC:
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.
Professional Educator Standards Board. (2014, July). Classroom teacher and student
demographics in Washington State: An analysis of changes over time. Retrieved from
http://www.pesb.wa.gov/publications/reports.
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